Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.
David EaglemanYou are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.
David EaglemanEverything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed.
David EaglemanThink about the brain as the densest concentration of youness. It's the peak of the mountain, but not the whole mountain.
David EaglemanWe are not at the center of ourselves, but instead - like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe - far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.
David EaglemanAs Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something - feats that modern computers simply do not do.
David Eagleman